They are voluntary groups of individuals distributed worldwide which interact and work with other individuals with whom they share interests, passions, affinity, curiosity, sense of membership, willingness to participate, ideas, knowledge and personal experiences for creating, developing and disseminating creativity and innovation, normally on behalf of firms.
Published in Chapter:
Open Innovation through Customers: Collaborative Web-Based Platforms for Ethically and Socially Responsible New Products Part 2
Barbara Aquilani (University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy) and Tindara Abbate (University of Messina, Italy)
Copyright: © 2014
|Pages: 38
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5880-6.ch017
Abstract
This chapter aims at analyzing how firms can successfully embrace an Open Innovation (OI) process through customers, involving them individually or in communities, in the co-creation of ideas, knowledge, products, services, processes, putting into action and integrating their creativity with firms' resources. Three main areas of interest, essential in the authors' opinion to meet this new challenge, have been analyzed through a literature review process, to create a framework able to show the challenges organizations have to meet externally (i.e., consumerism) and internally (i.e., organizational changes) in this shift of the innovation paradigm: consumerism features and challenges, OI approach and web-based platforms, and organizational issues involved in the OI paradigm shift. The previous chapter has discussed consumerism and OI approach, while this one will afford OI platforms and organizational changes as well as the resulting framework. Four contributions distinguish this study: (i) the link between consumerism and OI; (ii) the focus on customers as a source of external innovation; (iii) the identification of alternative ways to access OI with customers and their features; (iv) the disclosure of a “hybrid” mode to develop OI through customers.